How Kira Talent went from a classroom to a fast growing venture

To think, 18 months ago, Emilie Cushman was sitting in her fourth-year university classroom in Windsor, Ont., writing exams.

Now, the video-interviewing software company, Kira Talent, she co-founded just netted more than $2-million in funding, and counts KPMG and EY among its clients.

“It’s always a surprise where this is going,” Ms. Cushman said. “To be on this journey and now having raised just under $2.5-million to have a much bigger team, and even to be doubling by the end of the year. It’s a really interesting experience.”

Kira Talent, co-founded by Ms. Cushman and Konrad Listwan-Ciesielski, came out of The Next 36 program, a nationwide initiative that brings fresh university graduates from across the country together, and assigns them high-profile mentors from Canada’s business elite to help them develop a product or service, then build a business and run it.

Since being accepted into the entrepreneurship program, the pair have established the business in downtown Toronto, and raised more than $2-million during its funding seed round — the largest amount of any of the ventures to come out of The Next 36.

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Claudia Hepburn, the program’s executive director and co-founder, said Kira Talent benefitted from a “great combination” of a talented team that gelled well, great connections through the program, and a strong mentorship from private-equity investor John Kelleher, who helped them manage relationships with the private sector and investors.

“And they had a great idea for a product that they could identify a need for because of their personal experience getting into The Next 36,” she said. “And one with a simplicity and a beauty that’s applicable to both industry and academia.”

The latest funding round in the fall was led by Relay Ventures, a mobile-focused venture capital fund based in Toronto and Palo Alto, Calif. Other investors include Tony Lacavera, Wind Mobile chief executive, and Roger Martin, BlackBerry board member and former dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Kira Talent’s video-interviewing platform — which enables candidates to record their interview responses and companies to comment on candidates — is now used by roughly 60 clients across more than 80 countries, Ms. Cushman said. It’s a fast trajectory: the pair were accepted into The Next 36 entrepreneurship program as part of its second cohort in November 2011.

It was the process of applying that sparked the idea of Kira Talent, said Ms. Cushman, a graduate of the University of Windsor’s business program. Applicants were asked to send in a 60-second YouTube video explaining why they should be chosen.

“I was convinced that was the reason I got into the program,” she said. “When I thought of all the other amazing people applying, we probably all look the same on a piece of paper and an application. But I thought the video was a really interesting way to stand out in a crowd.”

Ms. Cushman and Mr. Listwan-Ciesielski, a mathematics and computer science graduate from the University of Waterloo, wondered if they could develop a way to use video interviews in corporate and academic hiring. The idea became reality by the spring, when the pair incorporated the company in March 2012. They worked to build the product over that summer and started out in the academic space, nabbing their first big client in July 2012 — the MBA program with the Rotman School of Management.

“As soon as we pitched them the idea, they jumped on board,” Ms. Cushman said. “And we crafted the product in many ways to the way that academics use it.”

That October, they launched their first round of financing, raising an undisclosed amount, which allowed them to grow Kira Talent to five employees, she added. They started with Rotman that month as well, she said.

Kira Talent signed on many more academic clients — helped by the fact many of their connections through The Next 36 were tied to Canadian universities.

When the startup was being formed two years ago, there were few players in the video-interviewing space. “Only 11% of companies were using video in some way shape or form,” Ms. Cushman said. “Now, its probably more than 60%, probably into 70%. It’s a market that’s matured very quickly.”

The internet is flooded with competitors, including HireVue, who list retail behemoth WalMart and mining giant Rio Tinto among its clients.

Unlike Kira Talent’s competitors who are aiming for the Fortune 500 firms, the startup with a handful of employees competed by setting its sights on medium-sized enterprises.

“What we’re targeting is the companies with smaller HR teams that still have that global reach and still have thousands of applicants coming in, but just don’t have the bandwidth,” Ms. Cushman said.

The company aims for this segment with its pricing, and simple set up, allowing companies to start using Kira Talent within days or weeks, as opposed to months with a long development process, she said.

As well, the interface — which focuses on video interview clips as opposed to live interviews — is uncluttered, Ms. Cushman said.

Clients now include the ivy-league Yale School of Management, the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business and Sun Life Financial.

Kira Talent now has 15 employees, but aims to double their staff within the next couple of months. It is also in the process of moving into a larger space to accommodate its growing ranks.

It has also expanded its platform and launched a mobile app in October, which lets users review and comment on candidates’ videos on the go. “We like to think of ourselves as the lightweight, scaleable option for the smaller clients,” Ms. Cushman said.

Another component that helped boost Kira Talent is that The Next 36, an entrepreneurial and charitable startup itself, has gotten better at preparing new entrepreneurs, Ms. Hepburn said.

The program now offers more guidance, has tweaked the curriculum and has changed the makeup of the students they choose to incorporate more with technical and programming skills, she said.

“It’s not surprising that our companies in our second year were much more successful than our first year,” she said. “I’m expecting that a year from now we will have had several companies that have raised rounds that are probably greater than Kira’s, and Kira will probably have raised another round that’s greater.”